As I was trying to upload my photos from my phone to Dropbox last night, I found out there was not enough space left to upload the photos. Therefore, I clicked on the button “Get more space”. The page in the picture above popped up. The first option is to upgrade your account, and of course, not for free. In order to get 50 GB of space, I will have to pay $99 per year. I was shocked by how much I have to pay to get some online space. If I had to pay $99, I would rather buy USBs.
Without a doubt, I looked at other options. Surprisingly, all the other options were free, and one thing they had in common is that they somewhat requires you to use social tools. First, if you have a Facebook account and Twitter account, by connecting your accounts to Dropbox, you can get 250MB free space right away. Second, by referring to a friend, you can get 500MB free space. In my opinion, one of the most efficient way to refer to a friend is by using those social tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, and email. For example, if you have 300 Facebook friends, and one third of your friends (100 people) signed up for Dropbox through your reference, you will be able to get about 50GB space on Dropbox. In other words, by using social tools, you have saved $99.
First of all, why would companies ever want to make such deals that they don’t seem to get any direct compensation for? In my opinion, this is because they understand the value of social tools. Dropbox wanted its users to be its advertisers as well. This is the similar idea from the video Generation Like. Companies nowadays realize the value of sharing among its users. Therefore, companies like Dropbox would be willing to give up some of its profit to gain potential users and earnings. However, what if all of its users use social tools to get free online space, and no one actually needs to pay anything in the end. Do you think it is realistic and realizable?
Social tools does save us a lot of money, especially because we can delete the old information. So there is no need to really upgrade to get more space because we can just delete stuff when we run out of space. Also think about how our cell phones, tablets and laptops save us a lot of money as well. Yes it is pretty pricey at first but it saves you so much more. You are able to access all your documents all the time in one place. The accessibility that social tools provides for us at such low cost is amazing. Also companies probably offer more space for those people who really need it, probably for people who are in businesses. It is smart of Dropbox to give you more space if you link it to X account because they link can do a lot more for them. And to us it is no big deal I just link it and I get more space. Something that takes us less than a minute to do but can get us more space – now Twitter and Dropbox both have our information which is probably more valuable to them.
Even though there are ways around to paying for more space on Dropbox, these sorts of companies that connect social media to their products is free advertising for them. You basically become an ad by sharing or referring their service to your friends, and they are able to gain access to your information on the social media you use.
I think that even if there were a large amount of dropbox users that only acquired the free space (via social media connection), dropbox would still be profiting. This is because, if people try to get that free space by connecting their facebook accounts to it or by referring friends to it, they still create traction towards dropbox and eventually someone will want to pay for a bigger amount of space than what is freely provided or dropbox will incorporate more ads into it so that they may get money through advertisement.